Hilltown Community Rights

Welcome to the homepage for the Hilltown Community Rights (HCR) email forum. HCR formed in March, 2014 in response to the news that a natural gas pipeline was being proposed to run through Ashfield.

Our principal mission is to build the necessary legal structure to ensure that the people who live here hold the final say in whether large-scale corporate, state and federal infrastructure projects are allowed to proceed in our community. We welcome and encourage our neighboring towns to join us and subscribe to this listserve.

The project we are currently focusing on is the Kinder Morgan “Northeast Extension” pipeline proposed to run from New York state to Dracut, MA in order to transport natural gas from Pennsylvania and other states. But this is not the first, and very likely will not be the last industrial project we face. In the future our focus may have to shift to dealing with resource extraction, the removal of ground water for bottling and export, transmission line expansion, industrial wind installations, telecommunications towers, large-scale solar arrays, and the dumping of toxic fracking wastewater from neighboring states.

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